Wade Rouse - Magic Season: A Sons Story

A beautiful, poignant and, yes, magical memoir that captures the tough and tender bonds between father and son. This book will captivate readers from start to finish.

John Searles, New York Times bestselling author of Help for the Haunted and Her Last Affair

Wade Rouses masterful memoir about coming out and coming to grips with his cantankerous, conservative father over a shared love of baseball is a pitch-perfect blend of storytelling, emotional discovery, and survival humor. Home run!

Meredith May, author of The Honey Bus and Loving Edie

This moving memoir teaches not only truths about the difficulty of masculine healing but also the joy of life a man knows once he attains it.

Daniel Black, author of Dont Cry for Me

Honest, authentic, heartbreaking and healing. Magic Season explores, in such a poignant yet hopeful way, the complicated family relationships that break us and make us. I devoured it in one day.

Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Eloquent, profound, and as funny as it is heartbreaking, Magic Season is a poignant reminder that those of us whove had rocky upbringings can go down to our tenderest parts and truly be ourselves, open to love. This glorious memoir hits it out of the park.

Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You

Also by Wade Rouse

Americas Boy

Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler

At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life

Its All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs, 34 Holidays, and
50 Boxes of Wine (A Memoir)

Im Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship: Hilarious, Heartwarming Tales About Mans Best Friend from Americas Favorite Humorists

Writing as Viola Shipman

The Charm Bracelet

The Hope Chest

The Recipe Box

The Summer Cottage

The Heirloom Garden

The Clover Girls

The Secret of Snow

Christmas Angels: A Holiday Novella

Christmas in Tinsel Tree Village: A Holiday Novella

MAGIC SEASON

A Sons Story

WADE ROUSE

Wade Rouse is a popular award-winning memoirist and internationally bestselling author of thirteen books, which have been translated into twenty languages and selected as Today show Must-Reads, Indie Next Picks and Michigan Notable Books. Rouse writes fiction under his grandmas name, Viola Shipman, to honor the working-poor Ozarks woman whose memory inspires his writing. He lives in Michigan and California, and hosts Wine & Words with Wade, a literary happy hour, every Thursday.

For my father

For the St. Louis Cardinals

And for every sports fan, father and son, parent and child, and soul who believes in hope, forgiveness and a win tomorrow

Contents

Love is the most important thing in the world,
but baseball is pretty good, too.

Yogi Berra

The game of baseball has been criticized in recent years for being too long. Too many substitutes, too many pitching changes, too many retreats from the batters box, too many meetings on the mound, too many commercials. But its actually a short journey from the first inning to the ninth, a couple of hours, and the outcome is often determined by little moments made from inning to inning, tiny decisions that decide the final score.

It is the same in life.

The last Cardinals game I watched with my dying father was filled with great hope and missed opportunities, just like life and the sport itself.

Our beloved St. Louis Cardinals were playing the hated Chicago Cubs in the National League Division Series. The Cards were down to their final game; my dad was down to his final weeks. We were both down to our final innings together.

Ironically, our relationship was a lot like the Cards-Cubs rivalry: intense, heated, bitter, filled with history and yet tinged with incredible admirationand disgustfor the opponent.

We had little in common besides baseball. My father was an Ozarks man, born and bred, and I was a city boy, a liberal turncoat who up and ran from the place he was raised. He was an engineer; logic overruled emotion. I was a writer. You get the picture.

But I had a lot of the Ozarks in me, too, which can make a man as hard and unforgiving as the rocky terrain.

What did I have to forgive my father for?

How long do you have?

And yet I loved him.

So deeply, despite all he did and didnt do for me, that my heart still flutters and moves all about my chest to this day, just like a good knuckleball.

You will likely ask why I stuck by my father, or even gave him a second, third or fourth chance at all. So, I ask you this: Why do you stick by your favorite team, season after miserable season? Its because, no matter how pessimistic weve grown, no matter what weve long endured, we always believe that a miracle can happen, that a magical season will occur and obliterate all the bad memories that came before. A true fan believes in his heart that even a terrible team can turn into a great one.

Life, like being a baseball fan, relies on two things: hope and forgiveness.

The only thing I ever wanted was my fathers approval. And I worked for it, yearned for it, through that final game, until his last breath.

Everything divided us. Except baseball.

Which was why I would take a seat next to him every time he patted the couch and the Cardinals were playing. I truly believed that, by the end of our final season together and that last game, the score would be different.

All I really wanted to do during our last game together was tell my father I loved him and forgave him. And all I wanted to hear was how much he loved me and how proud he was of me.

But, again, life and baseball really boil down to the simplest of things.

And those seemingly simple things would prove as difficult to come by as a big hit for the Cardinals in our last game together.

GAME 4

St. Louis Cardinals-Chicago Cubs
National League Division Series

Anything Can Happen

Before the start of every baseball game I ever watched with my dadas soon as the National Anthem had ended and his hand was off his hearthe would say the same thing: Anything can happen.

It was an astonishing statement of optimism from my eternally pessimistic father, who had pretty much hated the state of the world since his 1950s Happy Days life ended. But when the players took the field, the pitcher was warming up, the fans were buzzing, the sky was blue, the beer was cold and the game was scoreless, Ted Rouse was plumb near Walt Disney.

Anything can happen.

Thats right, I say.

He is wearing the Cards cap I gave him after they won the 2011 World Series. It is still in pristine shape. The bill is unbroken and the shiny stickers are still attached, and my dying father looks as if hes trying to emulate todays urban youth.

I watch his head bob, and then he is asleep.

Suddenly, the Wrigley fans roar, and my dad jerks awake.

Screw the Cubbies! he yells as best he can at the TV.

He looks at me and nods as if to say, Ive still got enough life to roar back, too, son.

We are sitting in the living room of the tiny home I had built for my nearly eighty-year-old father a few years ago. It was his wish to die at home. He hated his short-lived stint in assisted living.

Doesnt play well with others, the homes administrator had told me as if my father was in preschool.